


The Strange Tale of 000

by HerDarkReflection



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Billy Hargrove Has Powers, Eleven is sick of having her family threatened, Eleven | Jane Hopper is a Good Friend, Neil Hargrove's A+ Parenting, Protective Billy Hargrove, Protective Max, Smart Billy Hargrove
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:40:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22381975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerDarkReflection/pseuds/HerDarkReflection
Summary: This is a short glimpse of a story idea that hit me hard a while ago and struck me as worth exploring. Sadly, I’m already too overwhelmed with other projects to expand on this myself, so I’m posting this partially as a suggestion/plea so some heroic fellow writer out there might be inspired to continue this or at least adopt the concept:Unbeknownst to either of them, Billy and Eleven are actually biological siblings and Billy also inherited special mental abilities from their mother. The Mind Flayer chose Billy in this version of S3 for his connection to his biological sister as well as his own powers, including the ability to mirror her powers in the inbetween. El accidentally figures this out around the beginning of S3 and she and Max go on the warpath in order to get their brother back.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Billy Hargrove, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield
Comments: 7
Kudos: 85





	The Strange Tale of 000

**Eleven**

She knew she wasn’t supposed to use her powers to spy on people, but El wasn’t doing this to spy. Max was hurt, really hurt. The boys hadn’t been close enough to tell what had started the confrontation in the parking lot. As far as they could tell there had been a passing exchange of insults, nothing noteworthy until Max turned to walk away. The older boy, Tommy, said something that none of them had heard. _Max_ heard it; Max pounced. She gave Tommy a bloody nose, tore his Letterman jacket at the collar and walked away without a scratch on her. He had hurt her heart. El _felt_ it. The boys thought that she was worried over nothing; Max was good at pretending. She was tough but she felt so sad, angry and _helpless_. El knew she shouldn’t be alone like that, so she was just checking. That was all.

El walked through the dark, empty, in-between, searching. She caught sight of Max just as the other girl rammed her way in through a sticking door and stomped over to sit on the bed beyond. The frustrated redhead ignored a woman’s chastening voice calling after her and pulled her legs up against her chest. El followed, seeing how red and puffy her friend’s eyes were: Max was crying but was trying not to. She hid her face in her folded arms and El noticed a soft, clinking sound coming from beside them; someone was sitting in a battered old desk chair to Max’s right with his feet propped up on the cluttered desk. 

“I know you’re not putting your dirty shoes on my bed,” a deep, preoccupied sounding voice warned. El disregarded the curly haired teenager's ominous tone, but Max kicked her beat up blue-gray Converse's off without lifting her face out of the protection of her nested arms. She sniffled a couple of times, quiet and self-conscious, still trying to hide that she was crying.

Eventually Max calmed down and peeked out over her damp sleeve as if not quite ready to be caught looking at the only other occupant in the room.The blond in the nearby chair was still tinkering with a tarnished metal component in his hand, apparently too focused on it to acknowledge her anymore. El moved closer to study the object out of sudden curiosity. It was mechanical with lots of little brass gears and complex, interlocking parts. There was a larger, matching piece sitting on the desk by his booted feet and El crossed over to look. 

“Since when do you fix clocks?” Max asked quietly, watching her stepbrother work from that same shielded posture. El looked at the larger half of the old, antique device and noticed a couple of the parts had been replaced already. 

“Monday,” Billy muttered, resetting the tiny gear he’d been fussing with as El’s gaze started to wander over the tools and other trinkets covering his work-space.

“Six more days to go, then,” Max observed nonsensically. “And this piece of junk?”

El would’ve wondered what that meant if she weren’t so distracted by the picture she’d just spotted, sitting in the only tidy corner of the desk in a place of honor. 

“Found it,” Billy answered his stepsister’s question as tersely as he had the others. El was barely listening anymore, her original mission all but forgotten. She was transfixed by the old photograph of a woman and a little boy on the beach together, playing in the sand. “So you broke some kid’s nose?”

“Tommy H,” Max said quietly. Billy’s eyes flickered up from his work to meet hers, with a flash of contained rage.

“Fucking _Tommy_ hit you?!”

“He tried,” Max responded bluntly. That seemed instantly to relax him. The older teen returned to what he was doing as if he hadn’t been about ready to storm off and commit murder only a second ago.

El shrugged it off. She'd heard the stories. Everybody knew how wild Max’s stepbrother could be. She was more concerned by her discovery. The little boy in the picture looked like he was probably a much younger Billy Hargrove, but the woman smiling lovingly down at him was even more familiar.

“Hmm,” Billy acknowledged, careless and disinterested. “You’re getting chatty now.”

Max huffed and slumped back against the makeshift headboard. “So?”

“ _Momma_ ,” El blurted out in a bewildered breath.

Billy stiffened in his seat almost as if in response. He spoke instead to Max, seeming suddenly to remember that he was an asshole and his was the next line in their dysfunctional family script. “ _Sooo_ , get the fuck out of my room.” It wasn’t said with quite the amount of aggression one usually associated with Billy Hargrove despite the harshness of the words.

El looked back and almost jumped out of her skin when she found him looking not at Max, but straight at _her_. He turned a glare on his step-sibling with no other outward indication that he’d detected El’s presence. El dismissed the silly idea. It must have been a coincidence.

“And stop fucking up my door, Shitbird!”

“I’m not the one who broke the lock, Dumbass!” Max retorted with practically the exact same tone and facial expression as her brother. Billy surged threateningly to his feet and she bolted, slamming his bedroom door hard in her wake out of spite. 

“Hey!” Billy shouted, but then sat just back down to his work.

El opened her eyes and pulled her blindfold off, reeling from what she’d inadvertently discovered. She was sure of it: the woman in that picture, playing with little five-year-old Billy on the beach had definitely been Momma, but what was she doing there? Who was she to Billy? Why was her picture resting in a position of such importance on his desk? It couldn’t mean…

* * *

**Max**

“Oh, you found Ralph Macchio,” Max observed, pausing in her dancing to come over and crouch against the edge of El’s bed. It was a relief to see her friend finally beginning to relax and behave a little more normally. Ever since Max had arrived at the cabin for their sleepover, El had been acting more reserved than usual, preoccupied as if she were waiting for something bad to happen. Max knew better than to force the issue; El would share when she was ready, so instead Max had spent the past hour to trying to cheer her up in the meantime.

“Macchio?” El echoed with polite interest.

“Yeah. You know, the Karate Kid. Hiya!” Max did an exaggerated karate chop onto the mattress, finally managing to coax a laugh out of the other girl. “He’s so hot, right?”

El flashed her a skeptical look.

“So, is Mike a good kisser?”

“I don’t know,” El said with an aborted shrug. “He’s my first boyfriend.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Max corrected with a knowing expression. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m sure he’ll come running back to you in a second.”

El only frowned deeper as her gaze shifted down to her hands, almost guiltily.

“Seriously, I bet he and Lucas are totally wallowing, right now, in self-pity,” Max continued.

“I did something bad,” El cut in quietly and yeah, that was definitely a guilty expression. 

Max frowned, at a loss. 

“Didn’t mean to. I was trying to help.”

“El, what’s wrong? What do you think you did?”

“I spied on you. Last week. You were upset. I wanted you safe. Saw something, couldn’t look away.”

“What? What are you talking about? How did you _spy_ on me?”

“I go to the empty place, in-between, and I find people. Found you; not alone. I saw something unexpected, couldn’t look away… Sorry, Max.”

Max paused, not sure whether she should be pissed off or just borderline weirded out. She didn’t feel either. El rarely got this _verbal_ ; she must feel really bad. Max was still stuck on trying to figure out what exactly her best friend was trying to confess to. Thinking back she realized when El must be referring to, at least, and for the first time in years, Max found herself feeling protective over her jerk of a stepbrother.

She'd been defensive, sure. The incident with Tommy was proof of that, but Max never would’ve believed this was still possible-- nail-bat related truce or no. Billy had always been unpredictable, more volatile than anyone else Max had ever met even when they got along. He’d been like a real brother to her for a while back in Cali. Even then, she'd known him as a changeling who took on and shed different guises at random. Little Max had learned two lessons very fast. The first: Billy’s personality changed around other people and that change lasted from a minimum of a couple hours to a maximum of nine days straight (yes, she’d counted). The second: once they parted ways, there was no trick she could figure out to tell for certain which Billy she would be dealing with when she saw him again. Billy was a friend for the first few months-- her ideal brother, really, then one day Max came home from school to a Billy she barely recognized. 

He was a bully with a bloody face who behaved like a hate-filled bomb about to go off at any second. Max learned that day that her new big brother was dangerous. After that she kept her guard up, prepared for a fight and Billy fulfilled that expectation more and more often. She saw _her_ Billy less and less until by the time they moved to Hawkins her brother was gone. Every version of Billy she’d faced bore the same intense rage that she felt growing inside of her in response to his betrayal. She’d _thought_ they were friends and it was as if that friend had been overwritten by a toxic imitation without any reason or care. The unspoken understanding that El had inadvertently witnessed them enacting was the last remnant of Max's Billy that still remained. After the nail bat, once she gained enough confidence to calm down and stop steeling herself for an attack that wouldn’t come, Max had finally started to get what had gone wrong. 

The less she let her anger simmer under the surface, the less menacing Timebomb Billy’s threats. The impostor fade into nothing but empty posturing: a bluff. Max started paying attention; skill sets and mannerisms came and went but maybe it _wasn’t_ so random. Peacock Billy was borderline indifferent towards the people he wasn’t personally attached to-- meaning anyone who wasn’t Max or his friends from Cali-- an equal opportunity asshole: all spectacle, no substance; he showed up around high school a lot, with Tommy and Billy’s shitty fan club. TimeBomb Billy was feral, aggressive and downright racist; when he was around Neil came up a lot in conversation. Billy's taste in food changed, too: Time bomb Billy loved alcohol and red meat just like his dad, but after carting her around the mall for a whole afternoon, Max found herself with a painfully familiar, sarcastic, teasing big brother who dragged her to the food court muttering about a craving for cinnamon rolls which Max was inexplicably also experiencing. At this point she was more or less convinced that Billy must be an untreated split personality or something… She couldn’t really explain all of that to anyone, though, without sounding crazy herself. It would be even _worse_ if someone believed her.

“You saw me in Billy’s room, right? Look, I get it: he's... weird. I know he acts like a total psycho most of the time, but it’s okay, though. We have this kind of unspoken agreement since, like, _forever_. When things get really super shitty I can hang out in there with him as long as I keep out of his way. It’s... hard to explain. I only do it because, well, no one’s gonna be suicidal enough to follow me straight into the monster’s lair, you know?” Max reassured, only kind of lying. Sometimes, she just missed her brother, but El didn’t need to know. “It’s no big deal.”

El’s brow creased, not seeming at all satisfied with her excuse, which Max figured was fair enough. She thought she understood why until El spoke up. 

“There was a picture of a woman on Billy’s desk: long golden hair, laughing, with little Billy.”

“Okay, so why does that matter?”

El got up and opened a drawer in her dresser, pulling a worn, faded photograph out and passing it over with great care and reverence. Max accepted the offering and glanced at it, then her eyes widened and she did a double-take.

“Why do you have a picture of Billy’s dead mother in your dresser?!”

“Billy’s Mother?”

“Yes, El. Where did you get this? What the Hell is going on?”

“Not dead.”

“Um, _yeah_. She died in childbirth when Billy was a little kid. El how do you have this?”

“That’s Momma.”

Max stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending, then it hit her like a ton of bricks.

“You’re Jane. _The_ Jane, as in still born Jane who…” Max stared into space as the pieces began to come together in her head. “Holy shit!”

* * *

**Billy**

This. Was. Hell. Billy had always known that as shitty as his life was, things could always get worse, but this… this living nightmare was so much worse than anything he could ever have imagined and he could imagine quite a bit. 

For all his life, Billy had accepted the inevitable damage brought on by interacting with other people as--well-- _inevitable_. He had no choice; he was too freakishly impressionable not to. When Billy was around other people little scraps of their behaviors and sentiments absorbed into him like he was a mental sponge. Sometimes, it felt like they were smothering his understanding of himself, casting him into doubt for a while until the rush wore off. He was the very definition of the idiom “monkey see, monkey do” and it had taken Billy an embarrassing amount of time as a kid to figure out that other people can’t perfectly replicate anything that they see another person do simply by watching it once, then doing it the way he can. 

Billy’s father had beaten his “freak trick” out of him real quick after he’d stupidly talked back to Neil in a flawless mimicry of his voice. He should've known better than to show off. Twelve-year-old-Billy had been a naive dumb ass. He hadn’t known that he wasn’t supposed to be able to do _that_ either. Freak. Billy had always figured that at least his life couldn’t get any weirder than he was. Idiot. 

This thing inside of him was as strange and alien and wrong as Billy was willing to believe a thing could be. When things are alive Billy can get a feel for them, _learn_ from them; this was definitely alive, sentient even, but it wasn’t giving him anything he could work with. That just didn’t happen. This monster was intelligent enough to take control of Billy's body, make him into its living human suit and force him to do things that he couldn’t remember-- didn’t _want_ to remember. For his entire life, anything that Billy’s body came in contact with for long enough he eventually adapted to. 

That strange predisposition to persevere was the only reason why Billy had survived his father’s worst rages --the reason why he _never_ got sick for more than a couple of hours at a time. This thing? There was no resisting, no adapting. It spread through his being without mixing like oil over water. It was in control and it seemed that nothing could change that, no matter how much Billy struggled. How do you fight what you can’t even touch? He was trapped in his own mind, a helpless, living dead man.

He was kneeling on the floor over the monster’s latest victim, forced to watch and listen to his own words when all he wanted to do was scream and rage and do _something_ to stop this! 

Billy felt an odd, calm-curiosity wash over him without sticking. He’d only felt this once before back in his room about a week ago, only to dismiss it as a figment of his imagination.

_“I found him,”_ her voice was so quiet that he couldn’t be sure he’d heard anything at all. No, Billy thought, pushing the denial through his mind with stubborn force, I didn’t hear anything. We’re alone. No one would bother searching for a psycho like Billy Hargrove. They’d better fucking steer clear! _“I don’t know.”_ Billy didn’t hear shit.

“Don’t be afraid,” the thing using Billy’s voice told the sobbing woman on the floor, uninterested in his hallucination-- his distressingly young-sounding auditory hallucination.

_“He’s... on the floor...”_ Goddammit.

“It will all be over soon,” the thing purred in false reassurance.

_“...Talking to someone.”_

“Just stay very still,” it instructed. Billy didn’t sense someone moving closer because no one. Else. Is. Here. The monster stood and turned to look; Fuck!

The familiar transparent ghost of a brunette girl in a brightly-colored blouse gasped in shock as their eyes met.

“Brother?!” she muttered like a question, stumbling back a step looking shell-shocked. Yeah, join the fucking club, Kid.

Billy felt a smile twist his face without his permission while he was still struggling to comprehend what was going on.

“He can see me!” the ghost exclaimed.

“Hello, Jane,” the monster taunted and Billy screamed with everything he had, fighting to be heard. NO! RUN! THAT’S NOT ME! RUN NOW! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Of course his mouth wouldn’t move. His voice wasn’t his anymore. That didn’t stop him from trying though, even knowing how useless-- Jane’s expression changed, her jaw set, her dark eyes glinted fiercely then squeezed shut and her arms reached up towards her face. Jane’s ghost vanished in a whirl of vapor. It worked? Did she-- The monster scowled and suddenly Billy’s entire existence was pain.

He saw flashes of a dark pit. There was a massive tear down a blackened wall, glowing like burning embers: The Gate. A scream of effort, shrill and fierce cut his ears. He could see the girl suspended on some kind of lift facing the “gate” with blood running down her face. She was screaming like a warrior. The gate was closing-- No. It was _her_. Jane was controlling it somehow, forcing it shut. He could feel the monster’s pain and fury as she tore its reaching tendrils apart with her _mind_ , sending it fleeing back the way it came to its own world. WE MUST END HER! TOGETHER WE WILL KILL THE CLOSER OF GATES! 

No! Billy raged right back, vengeful and defiant. Jane could stop this thing, _had_ stopped this thing. So what if Billy couldn’t beat it; all he had to do was stand in this thing’s way until she struck the fucker down. Billy was nothing if not stubborn. YOU WILL OBEY! The monster roared through his mind, trying to torment him into submission. The pain lanced through every fiber of his being, intensifying until he blacked out. When he awoke the next morning still sore but able to think clearly again, Billy decided the pain was definitely worth it. Jane got away and Jane could kill this thing. Ha! Fuck you, Monster! Billy Hargrove: 1, Monster… Who the fuck knows? Point is, now Billy was finally getting somewhere!

* * *

**Eleven**

Max tore off her blindfold and shuddered, eyes wide, gasping for breath as if she’d just run a mile. Max was already hovering over her in concern, unsure of what to do.

“Something’s wrong! Not him! He’s Billy and he’s not… He…” El trailed off, still trying to process what she’d see.

“Hey! You’re okay! It’s okay. El, what did you see?” Max questioned, looking almost as freaked out as she was. “You said he saw you. That’s not normal, right?”

El shook her head. “Not okay. Something else there. Something _bad_.”

“What do you mean? Is Billy in trouble?” Max asked “Is he hurt?”

“Big trouble,” El said. “It’s in Billy, knew me.”

“It’s…” Max began to echo, then her expression turned thoughtful. She sat back on her haunches, staring fixedly at the ground.

“Max?” El inquired, suddenly getting the feeling that there might be something important that her best friend hadn’t told her.

“You said something else was in Billy, like, he was him but he wasn’t?”

El stared her down, expectant.

“It almost sounds like…” Max caught herself, looking uncertain whether she should continue.

“Like?”

“Um… It’s complicated. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”

“Friends don’t lie,” El stated forcefully. Max’s lips pressed together unhappily, then she relented.

“Fine, but you can’t tell other people, okay? Everybody already thinks that Billy’s a psychopath and I don’t actually want him to get thrown in the loony bin forever, so...”

“What is ‘loony bin’?”

“An insane asylum-- kind of like prison for crazy people. It’s not a good place and I’d probably never see him again,” Max shook her head clear of the distraction. El reflected on the new concept. Thinking of Momma, the perpetual loop her mind was stuck in, she imagined someone locking Momma up forever, away from her sister, away from Jane. She frowned determinedly.

“No loony bin.”

Max visibly relaxed and took in a deep breath before explaining “Good. Our secret.”

El gave a solemn nod. 

“Okay. What you said: about it being him and also not, that could just be Billy. He’s done this weird thing for as long as I’ve known him. It’s like he changes into different versions of himself when he comes into contact with other people, like-- Oh! Okay! You remember how when you found me in Billy’s room, he was repairing a clock?”

El’s brow furrowed. She nodded again, a little confused by the digression.

“He couldn’t do that before. No one ever taught him how to do it. Honestly, before that Monday, I’m pretty sure that Billy didn’t even give a shit about clocks, but the Billy he became on Monday did. I guess, maybe he hung out somewhere with a lot of clock repair people around or something? I’ve seen things like that happen before. I don’t know if he’s conscious of it, or if he even has a choice. I used to think so. I kind of hated him for it, but now I think he might just be, like, off in the head or something. I don’t think it’s his fault. Some Billys aren’t even that bad.” Max scrunched her face up “Oh great, now _I_ sound nuts.”

“Does he ever become...bad?”

“Well, I mean Timebomb Billy has a crazy temper. He beat up Steve, so…” Max provided honestly, waving her hand in a vague gesture that didn’t appear to have any particular meaning.

El gave her a questioning look.

“Yeah, sorry, I started nicknaming them years ago, never thought I’d actually end up saying them out loud to someone else.”

“Not temper. Real bad, like Papa. Kill--”

“What? No! No way!” Max denied, horrified by the idea. “El, what did he do?”

“There was a woman on the floor. Hurting her. Not mad. Didn’t care. He saw me. Said ‘hello, Jane’.” El swallowed thickly, looking sickened by what she was recounting. “Started... flickering. Billy, then not-Billy. One was crying, yelled at me to run away, said it wasn’t him. Other Billy was smiling.”

“Oh, shit! Holy shit! That’s-- We have to do something! We have to find them! Did you see where he was? Wait! You saw the woman he was hurting. What did she look like?”

“Dark hair, pretty, red swimsuit.”

“Red…” Max turned away distractedly as her eyes searched the room. She jumped up and grabbed the red and white muscle shirt she’d snatched off the top of the clean laundry basket Billy had been carrying as she ran out. “He swore at me _so_ much for stealing this,” Max remarked smugly. “Did you see this?” she held the shirt up so that El could clearly see the logo on the front.

“Yes! Here,” El touched the center of her chest, where it had been emblazoned on the woman’s suit.

“You saw Heather,” Max informed her victoriously, “She’s another lifeguard that works with Billy. I think I know what we need to do.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> If anyone wants to take this idea and run with it (seriously, somebody please do that) leave me a comment to let me know. Or also, of course, if you just liked this or whatever; it would be nice to hear what people think.


End file.
